Grandparents of Interventionist Art, or Intervention in the Form. Rewriting Walter Benjamin's "Der Autor als Produzent" (The Author as Producer)

Gerald Raunig

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I'm sure you no longer remember what role art plays in Plato's
State as the perfect community. In the interest of community
life, he bans art. He has a high regard for the power of art.
But he believes it is harmful.

That you no longer remember Plato, doesn't matter at all.
There are numerous cases in participatory, activist, interventionist
art that confirm Plato in that they culturalise and aesthetise.
Political inequalities are concealed and in their care for
the "real people, the real neighbourhoods" they
continuously need to construct the "Other" first.
Much of art production turned toward community art in the
early 90s. Generally, on account of the pressure exerted by
economic conditions and more importantly due to the slump
in the art market. Many of the resulting, superficially politicised
projects did not, to a large degree, self-address their own
work. But they propagated the straightforward transgression
of limits and art as a social cure. In the 90s, Mary Jane
Jacob's "Sculpture Chicago - Culture in Action"
(1992/1993) became the paradigmatic punching ball in the USA,
in Austria the Höhenbüchler sisters were criticised
in this context.
And much has also been written on this subject: by Marchart,
Rollig, Kravagna, Kwon, Höller, Babias, and others. But
even earlier on and in depth in Benjamin's two small essays
on art, especially in his lecture entitled "Author as
Producer" in 1934 at the Parisian "Institute for
Fascist Studies". In this essay, Benjamin cites examples
for his assertion that a considerable share of so-called left
literature had no other social function than to take new effects
from the political situation and to entertain the audience
therewith. For this purpose he used examples of Döblin,
Heinrich Mann, the theoretician of activism, Hiller, or the
aesthetising products of the Neue Sachlichkeit. A tradition,
which, by the way, caused an exponential increase of the revolutionary
in the art field of contemporary Austria: theatre directors,
exhibition directors, curators, whose voices went silent soon
after the initial stir caused by the installation of the right-right
coalition government in February, who are now back to business
as normal and who are opening their institutions to members
of the government for representative purposes, to persons
they had rejected just before.

How about the other way round, how about the positive influence
of the political in art, what about the success of a politicising
art, how about the effective ways of intervention? In the
lecture he delivered in the Parisian den of lions, in an institute
associated with the national front, where aesthetic quality
was strictly subordinate to content, Walter Benjamin rejected
the crude utilisation of art, he refused pure tendency art.
And his voice was against any instrumentalisation of art's
content for the "correct politics", where technique,
quality, and form were not even considered. The tendency,
the content can only be right if the form is in tune with
it. The correct tendency in terms of content must also include
a tendency of form.

In accordance with Benjamin's dialectical pattern, I believe
that precisely for the benefit of these productive games of
micro-political reformism structural change should be given
preference to the big content design, meaning intervention
in form, which goes into the vague and puts subjects, both
the artists and their objects up front in communities. In
terms of a materialist criticism, the question should not
be where a project stands in relation to its production conditions
but how it is positioned within them.
This brings us to the grandparents of intervention whom Benjamin
described, to an artist who in the Soviet Union of the late
20s transformed his art production ever more radically into
concrete micro-political interventions:

Sergej Tretjakov differentiates between the operating writer
and the informing writer. His mission is not to report but
to fight; not to play the viewer but to intervene actively.
He defines the mission by making statements on his own work:
when in 1928, in the era of total agricultural collectivisation,
the parole was "Writers into the kolkhoz". Tretjakov
joined the "Communist Lighthouse" commune and began
to work on the following themes during two long stays: the
convention of mass meetings; the collection of money for the
down payment of tractors; convincing individual farmers to
join the kolkhoz; the inspection of reading rooms; the creation
of travelling newspapers, and the management of the kolkhoz
newspaper; writing reports for the Moscow newspapers; the
introduction of radio and travelling cinemas, etc.

Behind this pell-mell of activities, which at first glance
may seem somewhat strange, there is a concept involving the
radical shift of positions not only in art production but
also in art reception. On the part of producers, a new way
of politicising art comes about by extending the artistic
competence in developing new forms to the development of micro-political
organisational forms. The political significance of art does
not lie in the clichéd resistance of the autonomous
piece of art or in the coarse tendency of the revolutionary
subject, but in the translation of the artists' formal competence
from a piece of art to the organisational forms of society.
The cultural worker, or "operating writer", a special
case in point, has the task of producing productive starting
conditions, providing incentives, questioning structures.
"Tendency" comes not from the subjective proclamation
of a know-it-all, it is experienced in a reality that changes
on account of a "literalisation of all life conditions".
And this is where Tretjakov's argument on the function of
producers migrates to the other side where an avalanche-like
metamorphosis of consumers into producers is to be effected:
"Everyone can and should ... introduce a maximum degree
of precision, clear-cut contours, and purposefulness into
the thing produced by him, just as dedicated specialists have
until now, the form searchers, the workers of art. Advocates
of the transformation of raw materials into a certain socially
beneficial form, combined with the ability and the intensive
search for the most meaningful form - this is what an "art
for all" must comprise. Everyone should be an artist,
a sublime master in the thing he is doing at a certain moment
in time."
Especially the last item in the list of Tretjakov's areas
of work at the kolkhoz made clear how significant the newspaper,
radio and film are for his idea of an art for all: from the
liquidation of illiteracy and the newspaper on the wall to
the transformation of simple workers into correspondents of
the Pravda newspaper. This was the concept that allowed Walter
Benjamin to conclude, perhaps somewhat precipitously, that
in the Soviet Union work itself makes its voice heard.

In any case, the description of Tretjakov as the grandfather
of intervention clearly shows the categories both Benjamin
and I consider the most important in an interventionist art
that is not considered in terms of content:
The interventionists' activity lies in the preproductive,
meaning in a parallel dimension to the work aspect and above
all prior to it. This causes products more or less to become
unexhibitable, they are not circulated in the art market,
they no longer necessitate mediation.
Secondly, it has to do with intervention in the form, in the
structures of a micro-political field. Instead of work on
products, it must be work on the means of production.
Thirdly, aside from the micro-political effects, the model
nature of this kind of art is significant. It is able to provide
producers an improved apparatus and incites them to produce.
In my book "Charon, Eine Ästhetik der Grenzüberschreitung"
I analysed how this organising function of art is translated
into actual, contemporary art production, using the group
WochenKlausur as an example.

"Was tun", "What to do" is not only the
question Lenin asked and the title of this conference, it
is also a question Alfred Döblin put himself in his work
"Wissen and Verändern" in 1931. His communitaristic
reply is basically an appeal for humanity, tolerance, and
solidarity amongst human beings. Due to his lack of reflection
on his own position in the production process, he commits
the same error as contemporary identity-political tradition.
This tradition is dedicated to helping and supporting so-called
"disadvantaged social groups" and to empowering
communities. In these examples of community art gone bad,
the squalor, the inequalities have been successfully revealed
and turned into an object of pleasure and of consumption by
presenting community art in a fashionable way. Brecht's cardinal
error is committed and exaggerated by providing the material
for a production apparatus without changing it. While target
group, community, or neighbourhood are prescribed a limited
identity through the process of othering, the participating
artists keep their phantasmatic position as flexible universalists
overseeing all.

A reply in Benjamin's terms would be: If intellectuals or
artists attempt to find a place alongside the proletariat,
they already position themselves above them. What kind of
position could that be? That of a benefactor, or an ideological
patron. An impossible position. If in the artistic-scientific
field the question "what to do?" arises, we must
suppose that any solidarity of the Foucault's specific intellectual
(the only one feasible as model) with "the" proletariat
will be one that is mediated. Following Tretjakov and co.
it would thus be meaningful not to concentrate on the bettering
of us humans, but on changing the structures that permit inequalities
to exist. An update of a Brecht-Benjamin demand calling for
the production apparatus to be supplied without changing it
would be: let us not supply the production apparatus, let
us change it.